


Who Else But Me

by Calchexxis



Series: You & Me [1]
Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, F/F, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Married Couple, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-20
Updated: 2021-03-20
Packaged: 2021-03-29 02:48:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30149589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Calchexxis/pseuds/Calchexxis
Summary: The war is over and peace is settled, but once the fighting is over, the nightmares are still left to haunt the ones who fought the hardest.
Relationships: Jaina Proudmoore/Sylvanas Windrunner
Series: You & Me [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2226048
Comments: 15
Kudos: 139





	Who Else But Me

**Author's Note:**

> A bit of Sylvaina inspired by all the great authors of this couple in this fandom.

“Burn it.”

Sylvanas’ voice was deadly calm, but beneath it rippled an unspeakable rage. It boiled and thrashed like a wild beast, drowning beneath an ocean of viscous, clinging oil, endlessly dying, never dead, with only its hatred for comfort.

“My Lady…” Nathanos began, his eyes flicking towards Teldrassil, and across the siege weapons arrayed on the beach against it.

“Warchief!” Varok Saurfang stepped forward, his bellicose face twisted with disgust.

In an instant, the calm was gone from Sylvanas’ face, warping into a rictus of fury as she whirled on them, her red eyes blazing.

“BURN IT!” She roared.

Nathanos worked his jaw for a moment, then blew out a slow breath and lifted a hand to the Forsaken warriors manning the siege weapons, readying to give them the order that would see thousands of civilians burned alive or choked by smoke and ash. 

“Marris, don’t do this,” Varok growled.

“I owe my loyalty to my Lady,” Nathanos replied solemnly. “Not your honor, old man.”

Gritting his teeth, Nathanos lifted his hand above his head and—

Sea salt and fresh snowfall struck across Horde beachhead like a slap in the face, and Sylvanas bristled instantly, her red eyes going wide as she stiffened. Nathanos and Saurfang both stared, blinking in surprise, over their Warchief’s shoulder at the open channel of water between the beaches of Darkshore and the mighty Teldrassil. 

“No,” Sylvanas muttered without turning around. “No one’s that suicidal… not even her.”

Nathanos curled the fingers of his raised hand and withdrew it, whatever order he might give, now was not the time. “My Lady,” he said quietly, “we appear to have a visitor.”

The dead do not feel the cold, not as a mortal feels it. The extremes, yes, in a muted sense Sylvanas could feel pounding heat and biting cold, but only in a distant, intellectual way. She could stand on the tower of Icecrown and know that the tissues of her body were freezing, or hold a hand over the Molten Core itself and know her flesh was curling away, but the true _feeling_ of it was muted.

Only one thing in the world had ever made her feel truly cold, as she had in the days when she was a ranger. When she was alive.

Turning slowly, Sylvanas raised Deathwhisper and nocked an arrow, raising it to take aim at the woman who stood on a platform of ice some meters away from the beach, the vestiges of a portal flickering away behind her.

“Don’t do this, Sylvanas.”

Against her better instincts, Sylvanas felt a pull at her lips as a faint smirk formed at the sight of the once-Archmage of the Kirin Tor. She stood resplendent, as she always did, in her gold-edged, azure robes. Her hair, bleached white by mana-saturation save for a single, long lock of buckwheat gold, was tied back in a braid that rested over her shoulder and, in her hand, she gripped the legendary staff that had yoked the power of the Thunder King, once upon a time.

Jaina. Proudmoore.

“You dare?” Sylvanas breathed the words. “After all you’ve done. After Lordaeron… _you dare?_ ”

“You wanted that war, Sylvanas,” Jaina said grimly. “You chose that fight, chose to blight your own city rather than allow us to take it. I did what I had to.”

“And now I do the same,” Sylvanas replied.

“No one is making you into a butcher, Windrunner.” Jaina took a step forward, the ocean water freezing under her feet as she walked towards the beach. “So I am _begging you_ , Sylvanas, don’t do this.”

The Archmage raised her staff, and orbiting spheres of ice the green of an ocean storm crackled into existence around its head.

“You will die here if you do not flee,” Sylvanas said calmly as she drew her arrow back. “You are powerful, not invincible.”

“And if I let you do this, then whatever may have been left of the Ranger General of Silvermoon will die.” Jaina’s staff crackled louder, and the expression on her face tightened with desperation. “I won’t let you become a monster.”

The grim grin on Sylvanas’ face widened with vicious elation, and a mad bark of laughter escaped the Banshee Queen.

“Really, Proudmoore?” Sylvanas crooned caustically. “ _You_ , of all people, are lecturing _me_ on the devastation of a city? This is war! Where was your high-minded stance on butchery when you threatened to drown the whole of Orgrimmar in your vengeance? Where were your morals when you moved to slaughter thousands for the acts of a madman?”

“They were with my friends,” Jaina said, her expression shifting under the weight of grief. “With Go’el, and Kalec… my morals were with the people who still remembered who I used to be.”

Sylvanas sneered. 

“Friends… you truly _have_ gone mad if you think we’re—”

“We’re not friends, Sylvanas, and I don’t think we ever will be,” Jaina cut in. “You don’t have friends anymore, all you have left are people who have taken the time to truly get to know you—enemies, like me, begging you to show the shred of mercy and honor that I know is still in you.”

Every word Jaina spoke sent shocks of anger through Sylvanas’ dead limbs. Every inch of her screamed to shoot, to loose arrows and scream until the flesh peeled from the bones of arrogant mage in front of her. How dare she.

_How dare she._

“How dare you.” Sylvanas drew the bowstring taut as her eyes widened with fury. “How dare you pretend to know me… to understand me!”

Jaina swallowed hard, a gentle motion in the graceful column of her neck, and lowered her staff, releasing the pent up mana slowly into the air, willfully disarming herself as she forced herself to meet the Banshee’s burning gaze.

“Who else could?” She asked softly. “After what he did to us… after everything we lost… who else could possibly understand you?”

Sylvanas’ jaw nearly fell open as Jaina took a small, tentative step forward. 

“Who else but me?”

The barest tremor shook through Sylvanas, almost like a heartbeat, as Jaina reached out a hand to the Queen of the Forsaken.

“Please, Sylvanas,” she begged quietly, “show mercy.”

The silence stretched for an age as Sylvanas stared hatefully at the woman in front of her. Eyes the color of blood spilled from her people when they were butchered wholesale by a death-worshipping traitor, fixed hard on the sorceress begging her to spare the innocent and guilty alike.

Finally, when Sylvanas let out a breath that she no longer needed to take, it was to lick her lips and utter a single word.

“No.”

Deathwhisper sang, and Jaina jerked back as a black arrow humming with necrotic energy slammed into her chest, splitting flesh, shattering bone, and piercing her heart, driving her off of her platform of ice to tip back into the cold waters of Darkshore.

As Jaina’s body hit the water, she saw fire. She saw Teldrassil burning. She saw ashes falling and heard the screams of those she had failed. She tried to scream but water flooded her throat and lungs. She flailed and reached for the surface of the water, now choked with the bodies of the dead.

Dead Kal’dorei, dead sailors of all stripes; Derek, Tandred, Daelin, her mother… Tyrande and Malfurion were there too, and Vereesa, and Thrall, and Anduin. Pained, Kinndy, Rhonin… and so many others, all staring down at her, accusing her of failing again.

‘ _I tried,_ ’ Jaina tried to speak but the arrow in her chest stole her words. ‘ _Forgive me… please, I tried! I..!_ ’

A hard-mailed fist plunged down after her, and where the metal touched seawater, rime spread like a wasting disease. Cold fingers wrapped around Jaina’s neck, ripping her up and out of the water, and suddenly she was surrounded by flensing winds. A winter tempest howled around the pinnacle of Icecrown Citadel, biting and gnawing mercilessly at her face and limbs.

“You failed.” The deathless creature that once owned the name of Arthas Menethil growled from beneath the frozen helm of the Lich King. “As you have always failed. As you _will_ always fail.”

Jaina could only croak as the Lich King tightened his grip, collapsing her throat.

“Now die, and die, and die again.”

His voice was the scrape of bones over permafrost as he raised Frostmourne, impossibly whole again, it’s skull-faced pommel staring balefully up the runed edge at her.

“ _Die as you lived… a failure._ ”

The blade plunged into the soft meat beneath her ribcage, cold as ice.

* * *

* * *

Jaina woke with a choked gasp, jolting in bed under sweat-soaked sheets as she clapped a hand over her throat and took deep gulps of air before moving her hand down to where the tip of Frostmourne impaled her in her dream.

There was nothing. No arrow, no cursed runeblade, and Arthas was long and truly dead. If only her memories would let her believe it.

A quiet sob escaped Jaina’s lips, and she put a hand to her mouth, trying to pin the pitiful noise inside with numb fingers while tears slipped freely down her cheeks as she shook and shuddered, anxious energy and pure panic threatening to steal every bit of strength she had left. 

It was so much easier during the war; there was always something happening, always a new threat or an old one come back to haunt them. Back then she could drown herself in her work til her nights were black with exhaustion. There was no time for dreams, back then.

Now, though?

The war was over. The threats handled. Arthas—dead, his citadel conquered, his power broken, and his Scourge yoked to the will of a Paladin. Azshara and N’zoth had met their final fates at the hands of Horde and Alliance champions. Even the Legion was put at bay by the might of champions and Illidan’s wardenship.

Now, the Horde and Alliance were at peace and had been for almost five years.

A year ago, First Arcanist Thalyssra had happily wed Tyrande Whisperwind after the latter’s amicable separation from Malfurion, thus binding the Shal and the Kal, the Night and the Stars, as one people. 

Azeroth stood victorious, and Jaina hiccuped as another panicked sob escaped her lips. No amount of victory could drown out the nightmares.

“Damn it,” Jaina whispered as she turned to the other side of the four-poster bed.

Shakily and shame-faced, Jaina reached out and put a hand on the cool, slender shoulder that lay across from her, and gave it a gentle shake.

Sylvanas turned over, blinking sleep from her eyes. Technically speaking, Jaina knew that Sylvanas didn’t have to sleep, but she could and often did now that her constant presence wasn’t needed to manage the war footing of the Horde.

An indulgence, she called it; sleeping next to her wife.

“ _Sylv._ ” Jaina hated how the word came out as a desperate sob.

“Dreams again?” Sylvanas asked as she registered Jaina’s state and turned over fully to face her. “Which one?”

“Teldrassil,” Jaina said bitterly.

“I said no?” Sylvanas ventured, and Jaina nodded.

Wordlessly, Sylvanas shifted the covers away from herself and opened her arms.

Swallowing thickly, Jaina shuffled over and curled up against the Warchief’s cool skin, savoring the scent of tulips and the iron-ozone smell of Saronite that always hung faintly around the woman from her armor. Jaina buried her face against Sylvanas’ shoulder, taking long deep breaths as she wrapped her arms around her wife’s middle while Sylvanas returned the embrace, pressing a hand to the back of Jaina’s head and stroking her hair gently while the Archmage of the Kirin Tor and Lord Admiral of the Allied Fleets cried herself out.

“Hush now,” Sylvanas whispered. “It was only a dream. I said yes.”

She did, as Jaina remembered clearly, once she moved past the dreams. She remembered the hard look on Sylvanas’ face as she lowered Deathwhisper and let the tension in the bowstring go slowly slack.

Jaina remembered how the Warchief had finally and grudgingly said: _fine_ , and how that single word had been like the last few pebbles of an avalanche or the final tremorings of an earthquake. She remembered how that word had, in a way, ended the war.

Not right away.

And not easily.

But Sylvanas stood down, much to the relief of Saurfang and Nathanos, neither of whom had been looking forward to burning the World Tree, despite being ready to prosecute their Warchief’s command, and there was meaning in that. When Sylvanas spared Teldrassil, it was a sign to the world that maybe… just maybe the age of madness was coming to an end.

Sylvanas, instead, vassalized Darnassus, forcing them to cede to the Horde by providing much-needed homes and resources to the Forsaken, recently orphaned from the loss of Lordaeron and the Undercity, and holding the ancient city hostage by dint of simply having an army living amongst thousands of civilians.

At the time, Tyrande had been furious. Malfurion, however, had grit his teeth and actually _thanked_ the Warchief for her restraint, for not forcing him to watch the nascent World Tree burn. That, Jaina imagined, was the beginning of their schism.

From there, came a temporary cease-fire. Then an armistice. Then a peace treaty, some years later, as by that time there were so many connections between Alliance and Horde civilians that reigniting the war would have caused civil war on both sides.

And in the midst of all of that, Jaina had fallen in love in a way she never thought she would be able to again.

In Jaina’s nightmares, Sylvanas said ‘no’, but in reality, she had said ‘yes’, and it would not be the last ‘yes’ the Warchief would give to the Daughter of the Sea.

She said ‘yes’ after the summit in Dalaran that saw the ceasefire signed into a proper armistice after two years of uneasy peace, when Jaina had nervously asked if she would like to have dinner together at one of the small cafes she used to frequent when she’d lived there. Sylvanas said ‘yes’ again when Jaina asked—at the end of dinner—to start corresponding by letter, keeping each other company in that way after realizing how surprisingly much they had in common.

Sylvanas said ‘yes’ again when Jaina, who lately had realized she’d begun falling for the Warchief, had dared to take a chance at asking her to dance at the Winter Veil Gala that Anduin hosted a year later.

They danced through the night, and Jaina couldn’t recall the last time she’d smiled so much, which was why she took another chance that night and got a ‘yes’ again when she asked if Sylvanas wanted to join her in her quarters for an evening coffee after the Gala’s end, all while fighting off a furious blush that made her feel ten years younger.

Coffee never got served, but the word ‘yes’ did end up featuring extensively that night from both of them.

For a year, Jaina and Sylvanas courted, until the sight of the Archmage and the Warchief attending meetings on one another’s arm came to be expected, rather than as a surprise. Over that year, Sylvanas said ‘yes’ many more times to dates, and to invitations, and to more dances than either of them could count because to Jaina’s great surprise, the Warchief of the Horde loved to dance.

Then, four years ago, it was Jaina who said ‘yes’ through a veil of tears when Sylvanas got down on a knee in front of an entire diplomatic envoy party at Suramar, and asked for Jaina’s hand in marriage.

In three years of diplomatic interaction, months of teasing flirtation, and another year of proper courtship, it was the first time that Jaina ever saw Sylvanas cry.

“I’m sorry for waking you,” Jaina said after more than an hour of off-and-on tears and shaking. “I’m sorry I keep doing it.”

“Don’t be,” Sylvanas replied, still stroking her wife’s head in long, calming pets as she laid flat on the bed with Jaina resting in the crook of her arm.

“This never happens to you,” Jaina said bitterly.

Sylvanas let out a quiet huff that Jaina knew was a laugh. To others, Sylvanas often came across as heartless, cold, and humorless. Anduin once remarked that Sylvanas made the notoriously sour Genn Greymane look good-humored.

It was during their nights spent corresponding that Jaina learned differently; that Sylvanas had a wonderful sense of humor, and that it was just dry. That she cared deeply for her people and would sacrifice anything if it meant keeping them safe

It didn’t matter to Jaina that when Sylvanas laughed, it was a sober, barely-there thing. Jaina loved Sylvanas’ quiet little laugh.

“I do not dream, my heart,” Sylvanas said pointedly. “But I take solace in your dreams, even the dark ones.”

“Why?”

Sylvanas pulled Jaina more tightly against her, and Jaina sighed contentedly at the sudden pressure, and at the feel of Sylvanas’ bare skin against hers that was slowly warming. Others might balk at the notion, but Jaina always found Sylvanas’ room temperature body to be incredibly comfortable to sleep against.

“Because only monsters do not dream,” Sylvanas muttered. “We give those up for our fangs and claws, I think.”

“You’re not a monster, Sylv,” Jaina said, reaching a hand up to brush her fingers over the sharp lines of the taller woman’s face.

Another quiet huff.

“I am _literally_ a monster.” Sylvanas said before turning to press her lips to the top of Jaina’s head.

Jaina squeezed a little tighter.

“Then you’re my monster.”

“Til the sun dies,” Sylvanas promised.

Another quiet sob escaped Jaina, though this one was happy as she buried her face against Sylvanas’ chest. There was no heartbeat, but there was something else—a thready pulse of omnipresent arcane energy that echoed through the Banshee Queen, and that Jaina knew only an exceptionally sensitive mage would be able to detect.

The pulse of Sylvanas’ captured life force.

Jaina took more comfort in that sensation than she had in the heartbeat of any mortal lover she’d ever had.

“Thank you.” Her words were a whisper carried across smooth skin as she brushed her lips over Sylvanas’ collar, then up the unblemished skin of her neck. “Thank you for being here with me, and for holding me when the nightmares come…”

Jaina shuddered as Sylvanas hugged her close until there was no space between them; nothing but the scent of tulips and metal.

“Thank you for loving me, thank you for always understanding.”

For a long moment, Sylvanas said nothing. She just held Jaina as grief and memories and dreams wracked her as they had for longer than they’d shared a bed. Sylvanas held on until the tears, which only came at night when there was nothing else to drown out the darkness but quiet promises and delicate kisses, faded.

Finally, Sylvanas buried her face in the soft silver-and-gold hair of her wife, and muttered: 

“Always.” Sylvanas held tight before drawing back to stare down into her wife’s eyes.

Eyes like sapphire. Like the cold blue oceans of her home. Eyes like the sky of Quel’thalas in winter.

“I will love you and share whatever burdens you bear, always,” she said, before leaning in to press her lips to Jaina’s.

It was a quiet, almost chaste kiss, tender more than anything, but it made Jaina’s heart flutter. Even now, after years of marriage, Sylvanas could still make her heart skip a beat with a look and a kiss.

As Jaina pulled away, she smiled, and settled in against Sylvanas’ pillow. She wouldn’t go back to her side of the bed tonight. There were nightmares over there, instead she held on as a yawn escaped her.

“I know,” she muttered sleepily. “Who else but you?”


End file.
